Today's nourishment, yesterday's tears

The sublime sights and sounds of Etosha today may well lead many to believe that the park’s founding exactly a century ago was solely based on the noble aim of animal preservation. However, African historian and author Edward Paice reveals that Etosha owes its beginnings to a rather more surprising set of influences, ranging from lofty dreams of fortune, fame and intellectual discovery, to the exploitation of local peoples and Germany’s fear of Portuguese expansionist ambitions. Early in 1850, two young explorers arrived in Cape Town with the aim of being the first Europeans to trek through Damaraland in South-West Africa to Ngami, a great ‘shimmering lake’ north of the Kalahari Desert that David Livingstone had observed a year earlier. They made a somewhat unlikely team. Francis Galton’s forebears were well-known Quaker gun-makers and bankers from Birmingham, while Charles John Andersson was the illegitimate son of an impoverished Welsh naturalist and a Swedish servant. Galton was a prodigiously talented cousin of Charles Darwin, a polymath who had been able to read at the age of two and by the age of six was reading Shakespeare for pleasure. Andersson had recently dropped out of the University of Lund. Galton was financially secure and motivated by lofty notions of intellectual discovery, while penniless Andersson sought fame and fortune (though he shared Galton’s interest in nature). Despite their different backgrounds, the partnership of the moneyed boffin and the adventurer was amicable and worked well from the outset. On 29 May 1851, 550km from Walfisch (Walvis Bay), Galton and Andersson came to the first Ovambo cattle-post at Omutchamatunda, where their caravan was received “very hospitably”. The following day they pressed on, and soon after passing a cairn that they were told marked the grave of the god Omakuru, they reached the eastern edge of “Etosha, a great salt-pan”. “It is remarkable in many ways,” wrote Galton. “The borders are defined and wooded; its surface is flat and effloresced, and the mirage excessive over it; it was about nine miles in breadth, but the mirage prevented my guessing its length; it certainly exceeded fifteen miles.” Galton and Andersson were the first Europeans to have set eyes on one of Africa’s greatest natural wonders – Etosha, the “Vast White Place” or “Place of Dry Water”. According to a legend of the hunter-gatherer San people, who’d lived in the Etosha area for thousands of years, the pan was created in the aftermath of a local settlement’s men being put to death by raiders. One of the settlement’s bereaved women was so distraught that it is believed she cried until her tears created a gigantic lake; in time, that lake dried to leave the salt pan. Like many legends this one contains an element of truth: the saline desert of Etosha, over a thousand metres above sea level, is indeed the remnant of a much larger lake. However, the lake’s primary source of water was not tears, rather it was the Kunene river, which flowed here until the Late Pliocene (two to three million years ago). Had Galton and Andersson had the time, resources and inclination to circle the salt pan instead of pressing on northwards to meet the Ovambo chief, Nangoro, the tale they took back to Europe would have been even more impressive. All told, the area encompassed by Etosha and its adjacent pans stretches 120km from east to west and 70km from north to south, making it about twice the size of the English county of Cornwall. Galton and Andersson were not able to push on eastward together to Ngami as planned, but they had succeeded in filling in a substantial part of what Galton described as “that blank in our maps which, lying between Cape Colony and the western Portuguese settlements, extends to the interior as far as the newly discovered Lake Ngami”. For this feat Galton was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Gold Medal, and Andersson’s book Four Years in Africa made his name as an explorer. Above all, however, it was their observations of the societies that they had encountered that aroused the most interest in the Cape and Europe. The terrain between Walvis Bay and Etosha was labelled by Galton as the domain of “the warlike Damaras”. He termed the area north of Etosha as the “land of great fertility”, and regarded its Ovambo residents as “kindly and intelligent” and “careful agriculturalists”. The sweetveld grasslands on the northern margins of the salt pan, the mopane scrublands to its south and west, and the waterholes and watercourses of the pan itself were roamed by the resourceful San, or “aboriginal Hottentots”. The San were also found to be involved in the thriving copper industry in the Otavi Mountains to the west of Tsumeb. There was considerable overlap and interaction between all these groups in the harsh Etosha borderlands, in which temperatures could fall below freezing at night and soar to 45°C during the day, not to mention tensions and age-old rivalries. Raiding – for cattle and people – was endemic, sometimes leading to full-scale hostilities. Within ten years of Galton and Andersson’s visit, Jonker Afrikaner, the powerful leader of the Oorlam Afrikaners who had moved north from the Cape earlier in the century to settle in central Namibia, ravaged parts of Ovamboland and Kaokoland. With the growing European presence in the south, and incursions by the Portuguese from Angola in the north, the Etosha area became increasingly destabilised in the second half of the 19th century. Even though internal strife had long predated the arrival of Europeans, the activities of Finnish and German missionaries, traders, and ivory-hunters, which introduced increasing quantities of firearms, considerably exacerbated the preexisting tensions. To subscribe or buy back issues, click here  In 1884, as Europe’s ‘Scramble for Africa’ began in earnest, today’s Namibia was declared the German protectorate of South-West Africa – and in the 1890s, German administration began to be felt as far north as Etosha. By 1896, 150 men of the colonial Schutztruppe and police were stationed along the southern border of Ovamboland. The outbreak of rinderpest in 1897, which killed 90% of the cattle in the north, led to the imposition of tighter regulations governing the movements not only of livestock but also of people. Two years later taxes were demanded for the first time by the colonial authorities and heavy fines were levied on communities deemed guilty of any of a long list of new and unfamiliar ‘offences’. With the new century the German cordon vétérinaire became still more political in nature. Although content to allow Ovambo chiefs a degree of self-government, not least because their territory was deemed too densely populated, too remote, and too harsh for large-scale European settlement, the colonial government was determined to wrest the benefits of their well-established trade links with the south from the Ovambo. Symptomatic of their intentions, German customs posts in the Etosha area became altogether more substantial establishments. In 1901 a fort was erected at Okaukuejo, the site of today’s park Headquarters, within sight of the improbably-named Ondundozonananandana mountains. Two years later a rather larger fort was built at Namutoni, the ‘Elevated Place’, to the east. South of this cordon, German colonisation intensified and the rights of all pre-colonial societies, even those that allied themselves to the German authorities, became more and more severely curtailed. Examples of armed resistance were commonplace during the 1890s, but when Abraham Christian’s Bondelswart Nama in the extreme south of the country laid siege to the German fort at Warmbad in October 1903, protest of a much more widespread, and at times coordinated, nature began. With the Bondelswart uprising requiring redeployment of colonial troops to the south, in Herero-dominated Damaraland chief Samuel Maherero seized the opportunity to attack a multitude of German targets. By the end of January 1904, 123 German men, women and children had been killed. In Ovamboland, chief Nehale also chose to break with the tradition of Ovambo chiefs resisting the German authorities by political means alone; 500 of his men marched on Namutoni. After putting up a stout defence, killing 68 of the attackers, Lt Volkmann and the fort’s six other defenders slipped away at night, and this symbol of German oppression was sacked. The bold attack on Namutoni, where memorials to both sides can be seen today, was the only major action fought by the Ovambo – although Nehale sent men on towards the German garrison at Grootfontein and continued to supply the Herero with ammunition for the rest of the year. With hindsight, this decision was to prove exceptionally fortuitous. By August 1904, General Lothar von Trotha had surrounded the Herero in the Waterberg Mountains, south west of Etosha, and gave his infamous Vernichtungsbefehl, or extermination order. “Within the German borders”, he declared, “every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at.” With more than 10,000 German and African Schutztruppe at his disposal (including, ironically, a large number of Herero), von Trotha prised his opponents from the Waterberg and drove them towards the Omaheke desert. What is generally recognized as the twentieth century’s first true genocide had begun. And it would soon be followed by another, as the authorities in German East Africa put down the Maji-Maji rebellion in equally resolute fashion. By 1907 the Herero, the Nama, the ‘Hottentot’ Witbooi Basters – former allies of the Germans – and a number of other rebel groups had been decimated. Of the first two, more than three-quarters had been killed or died as a result of von Trotha’s tactics, and their vacant land and stock was handed out to German settlers. To the north, the Ovambo and San populations escaped the worst depredations of the German authorities. But there were consequences for them as well. The fort at Namutoni was rebuilt in 1905 and the following year the German governor, Friedrich von Lindequist, declared his intention to create the ‘Ovamboland Reservation’. In 1907 its borders were officially demarcated. Amid the greatest tragedy ever to befall the people of South-West Africa, today’s Etosha National Park was born. The new ‘protected area’, covering 100,000 square kilometres, was the largest reserve in the world – two and a half times the size of Switzerland. To call it a ‘game’ reserve tells only half the story. Conservation was certainly a consideration: the banning of transport that had enabled hunters to increase their hauls of ivory and skins from the north was aimed at salvaging – from near-total destruction – the herds of elephant that had roamed the area in such huge numbers three decades earlier. But there would, in time, be no disguising the fact that the creation of the reserve was intended to harness the economic potential of wildlife for the benefit of the coloniser rather than the colonised, and to endeavour to exploit the colonised both as a pool of migrant labour for emerging industries further south and a buffer against the expansionist ambitions of the Portuguese further north. In 1908 the German authorities sought formal ‘declarations of obedience’ from the Ovambo chiefs, and unsurprisingly received them. In 1915 the German Schutztruppe surrendered to the troops of Louis Botha’s South Africa after a campaign lasting nine months, and South African hegemony ended only with Namibia’s independence in 1990. Those intervening years saw Etosha National Park shrink to 22,270 square kilometres, of which the greater Etosha Pan area accounts for about a quarter. The human population, especially the Hai//kom San, while not subjected to any repression comparable to that inflicted on their countrymen further south in the first decade of the 20th century, cannot be said to have thrived either. But if any good came from that dark time, it is the survival of the national park, which is now variously recognised as ‘one of the world’s pre-eminent wildlife areas’, ‘one of the world’s last Edens’, and a ‘crucial sanctuary for many of Africa’s diminishing animal species’. Today’s visitors can still see the endemic black-faced impala and Damara dik-dik (Africa’s smallest antelope), some of Africa’s tallest elephants, more than a hundred other mammal species, over 340 bird species and even a species of freshwater fish. Near Okaukuejo is the famous Sproukieswood, or ‘Haunted Forest’, of moringa ‘miracle trees’, the leaves of which are believed to be exceptionally nutritious and a prophylactic against more than three hundred afflictions. And after the rains, the Etosha Pan becomes a vast wetland breeding ground for up to a million greater and lesser flamingos, as well as eastern white pelicans, chestnut-banded plovers, and blue cranes. One hundred years after its creation, and seventeen years after Namibian independence, it’s hoped that Etosha National Park will never again be used as an instrument of political control or economic exploitation – and that the needs of all its inhabitants, both human and animal, can be accommodated in its second century.

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